While you can see there are still some "TODO"s, and minor scheduling changes still to go, the overall reviewing process is complete, and the schedule is sound.

The committee has reviewed over 250 submissions in total, sessions and tutorials. It took two months to review the sessions and finalize the schedule. There were very good submissions, and it wasn't till I started building the schedule that I realized just how many.

You know the feeling: you're at a conference, and there's this time slot where you just can't make up your mind which session to attend. As it turns out, anyway I look at it, I get this at each and every single time slot in this schedule. Hopefully all attendees should feel similarly.

What can you expect to find in the Santa Clara, April conference?

As always, we get variety of topics. First day is tutorials, which I already mentioned, followed by three days of sessions and keynotes.

Some topics you can guess: always place for good backup practice, performance optimizations for your InnoDB deployment, good indexing strategies and more.

Open source and emerging technologies are well covered: from Tungsten, Galera/Percona XtraDB Cluster, NDB Cluster to MHA, HAProxy, Hadoop, Percona Toolkit and more.

Replication, of course, is as always a hot topic, this year in particular due to anticipated 5.6 release

Speaking of 5.6, a lot of content on that, too. PERFORMANCE_SCHEMA, InnoDB, partitions, GIS and more...

Case studies: can you do without them? Get to hear how big companies used product/project X, what it took to make it work, how it helped them grow.

Chance to get up to speed on third party solutions: Akiban, Tokutek, ScaleDB...

Hardware: SSDs are all the rage. How do you nest choose and configure your hardware and deployment?

Best practices, security, monitoring, NoSQL...

And, I can't list everything, but a LOT of good, unique content!

I will write some more on specific sessions I find that are of unique interest.

Finally, this is my first time acting as committee chairman, and so much of this work was new to me, and I got to learn it on the fly. Thankfully, the committee is composed of experienced conference veterans, not to mention experts, who gave good advice. I was happy to ask for their advice and happy to accept. I wish to thank the committee members for their kindness and openness! (That doesn't mean I'm buying you all your beer though!)